One
account explains the exodus as a product of the civil war that preceded the May
1948 attack on Israel by its Arab neighbors.

Another
account, now making the rounds of Jewish book clubs across the United States,
is Ari Shavit’s My Promised Land.
Ignoring the recent work of prominent Israeli academicians and the growing body
of first-hand narratives and other primary sources, Shavit paints the exodus as
an act of ethnic cleansing.

Citing
primary sources, from by Israel Defense Forces (IDF) telegrams and reports, to
documents found at the Lydda Military Command, to personal accounts by both
Jewish and Arab participants, Israeli academicians Avraham Sela, Alon Kadish
and Arnon Golan’s book, The Occupation of Lod, July 1948, meticulously
documents the unfolding of events. Here is the account, in brief.

On
November 30, 1947, the day after the UN voted to partition the British Mandate
of Palestine, Arab fighters launched the War of the Roads. Stationed in Lydda
and other towns along the major trade routes, they attacked trucks and later
convoys carrying supplies to Jewish Jerusalem and other Jewish villages. In
July 1948, the IDF implemented Operation Dani whose ultimate goal was to gain
control of the road to Jerusalem. The first objective of the operation was to
capture Lydda.

The attack on Lydda was not organized or
carried out as planned, as indicated by IDF reports and telegrams. It was led
by the Palmach, a part of the IDF. On July 11, Moshe Dayan’s jeep force drove
into the city, opened fire, got lost, came under heavy attack by the Arab
Legion, and withdrew permanently.

Then
300 foot soldiers, led by Palmach commander Mula Cohen, with no heavy arms (and
not aware of Dayan’s intention not to support their push) entered the city.
They took tenuous hold of part of the city center.

According
to accounts by both Jewish and Arab sources, Arab fighters gathered at their
headquarters, olive groves, and the police station.

This is
well-established by first-hand accounts of Shmaryahu Gutman, the Palmach leader
in charge of negotiating with the Arab population of Lydda, and Arab civilian
guard member Spiro Munayyer.

On the
following day, July 12, two or three Arab Legion tanks entered Lydda and opened
fire on Jewish forces. Arab Legion forces stationed at the police station and
other local fighters launched a counterattack. After heavy fighting, the
Palmach maintained its precarious hold on part of the city center. The Palmach
exchanged fire with soldiers at the police station throughout the night and by
the morning of July 13, they discovered that all but one injured fighter in the
police station had abandoned the city.

Meanwhile,
Shmaryahu Gutman, according to his 1948 testimony, had spent two days
negotiating with the Arab leaders of Lydda asking them to lay down their arms.
They had sent a town crier to announce that all arms were to be placed in the
front of the houses.

Not a
single weapon was handed over. Like the Jews, the Arabs anticipated a
counterattack by the Arab Legion and hoped to wait it out. The Palmach,
however, had gathered approximately 4,000 men of military age, held in a mosque
and a church. Still, the Arabs refused to surrender. Only after the city leaders
realized that the Arab Legion forces had abandoned the police station on the
morning of July 13, did they agree to make a deal. If the 4,000 men were
released, the Arabs would leave the city. And so it was that most, but not all
of the Arab residents left Lydda.

Shavit’s
account rests on two false premises.

The
first is that the IDF captured Lydda from an unsuspecting civilian population
who were easily overtaken. Primary sources, however, indicate that the Arab
fighters were wellarmed and vastly outnumbered the Jewish forces. Sela and
Kadish estimate that at least 1,000 local fighters and 50 soldiers from the
Arab Legion held 25 anti-tank launchers, 20 machine guns, armored cars,
submachine guns and rifles.

The
second false premise is that prime minister David Ben-Gurion issued a top-down
order to Yigal Allon, head of the Palmach, to expel the Arab inhabitants. This
fallacy is one enthusiastically embraced by those who accuse Israel of ethnic
cleansing. Primary sources clearly show that the decision was initiated by the
commanders on the ground under fire.

These
primary sources include Palmach commander Mula Cohen’s reports and telegrams
from Lydda, other first-hand accounts, and an official IDF directive issued on
July 6, 1948.

The
directive, found in the IDF archive 2135/50, File 42, on the subject of
“Discipline,” orders that: “Outside of active fighting, it is forbidden . . . to
expel Arab residents from their villages, neighborhoods, and cities and to
displace residents without special permission or the clear instruction from the
Defense Minister in each specific case. Anyone violating this order will be
tried.” The directive was issued to prevent expulsion, not to provoke it.

Mula
Cohen, however, was unaware of this directive. In his memoirs To Give and To
Receive, Mula Cohen writes “Let me be clear: I do not deny that it was I, as
head of the brigade, who made the decision, and only after did I receive the
permission of the commanders of Operation Dani.” Yigal Allon accepted Cohen’s
view that the only way to hold Lydda was to expel the residents. Allon and
Yitzhak Rabin, his deputy, argued about it and went to Ben-Gurion. They were
perhaps aware of the directive and of the fact that they needed to obtain his
permission, since at the time he was also serving as defense minister.

What’s
missing in Shavit’s books and in most popular histories that are now being
written, the elephant in the room, is why the IDF targeted Lydda in the first
place.

Lydda
had been housing both local and foreign fighters who attacked the Jewish
convoys during the War of the Roads. Today this war is gradually being written
out of popular history and national memory.

Operation
Dani, which precipitated the mass exodus of the Arabs from Lydda and Ramla, was
the first in a series of three initiatives, the ultimate goal of which was to
free the road to Jerusalem to feed the 100,000 Jews living there.

When I
tried to explain this to my Jewish book club, nobody had heard of the War of
the Roads, or of the Jewish children who were starving in Jerusalem. I couldn’t
forget, of course, because my father was one of those children.

Max Blumenthal’s “Goliath” and the Mainstreaming of Anti-Semitism. By Petra Marquardt Bigman. The Louis D. Brandeis Center, February 17, 2014.Another Milestone for the Mainstreaming of Anti-Semitism: The New America Foundation and Max Blumenthal’s Goliath. By Petra Marquardt Bigman. The Louis Brandeis Center, February 17, 2014. PDF.Whitewashing BDS and antisemitism in the New York Times. By Petra Marquardt Bigman. Jerusalem Post, February 5, 2014.In “Goliath,” the Past Is Always Present for Palestinians. By Nadia Hijab. The Nation, February 25, 2014.Max Blumenthal Discusses Goliath: Life and Loathing in Greater Israel at the New America Foundation. NJBR, December 5, 2013.The Anti-Zionist Civil War on the Left. By Jonathan S. Tobin. NJBR, November 4, 2013.Marquardt Bigman:While
Blumenthal was perfectly capable to adjust his presentations according to the
audience he was addressing, he provided a chilling demonstration of what he
hoped to accomplish with Goliath during an event at the University of
Pennsylvania, where he was hosted on October 17 by political scientist Ian
Lustick to promote his book. Lustick noted at one point in the discussion that
Blumenthal showed in Goliath that “Israel is not just a little bit fascist,
Israel is a lot fascist,” and according to Lustick, this was the “ultimate
delegitimizer,” because after World War II, “nothing fascist can even be
allowed to survive.” Referring to the biblical story of the destruction of
Sodom and Gomorrha, Lustick invited Blumenthal to fancy himself in the position
of God in order to decide whether there are enough “good people” in today’s
Sodom-like Israel to save it from destruction. Blumenthal, who clearly didn’t
need convincing that Israel as a Jewish state shouldn’t be allowed to survive,
responded by explaining that his first concern was relieving “the suffering of
the indigenous people of Palestine.” According to him, the only way to achieve
this was by placing “external pressure” – such as the BDS (boycotts, divestment
and sanctions) movement is advocating – on Jewish Israelis in order to force
them to choose between emigrating and agreeing to “become indigenized” by
accepting Arab dominance in political, cultural and social terms.

This
open call for the demise of the Jewish state and a “Juden raus”-policy for
those of Israel’s Jews who would be unwilling to “become indigenized ”after the
hoped-for victory of the BDS movement did not remain one of the many barely
noticed events staged regularly by so-called “pro-Palestinian” activists, but
was reported by the Forward’s J.J. Goldberg. Yet, there were no consequences,
which arguably only illustrates the urgent need to fight the alarming
deterioration of the debate about Israel on American campuses.

When
NAF President Anne-Marie Slaughter was notified at the end of November that her
organization’s planned event for Blumenthal had been criticized at Commentary as completely inappropriate,
she dismissed the criticism by quoting the popular notion that the “best answer
for speech is more speech.” Unfortunately, however, there was no attempt
whatsoever to counter Blumenthal’s “speech” during the NAF event; instead, as
was to be expected, Blumenthal received some mainstream endorsements after the
event, most notably from veteran NAF board member James Fallows.

With
the Research Article published today, LDB is providing the long overdue answer
to Blumenthal’s “speech” by documenting that promoting his work on Israel
ultimately means to contribute to the mainstreaming of anti-Semitism.